Reading 'Harry Potter' Makes You A Better Person, Research Shows

If he keeps this up, this
kid's going to be a peace-maker.Lisa
Maree Williams/Getty

If you don't want your kids to grow up to be jerks, make sure
that "Harry Potter" is a part of their lives.

New research from an Italian university
suggests that J.K. Rowling's wizardly world helps kids to be more
empathic. It's all in the
study's title: "The
greatest magic of Harry Potter: Reducing prejudice."

There are two bodies of research intersecting here.

• Research is starting to show that reading
literary fiction can train you in social perception and
understanding other peoples' experience of the world.

• Other research shows
that you can get people to be less prejudiced if they interact
with people who they don't identify with — psychologists call it
"inter-group contact."

This can happen by way of
written word, reports Bret Stetka at Scientific
American,
since kids have
better attitudes toward "stigmatized groups" if they read stories
about friendship between characters from different sides of the
tracks.

Beyond the dragons and wands, "Harry Potter" has lots of those
group dynamics: there's the "muggles," derided for their
magiclessness; the "mudbloods," scoffed at for being muggle-born
(such as Harry's friend Hermione); and the curious case of Lord
Voldemort, "who believes
that power should only be held by 'pure-blood' wizards," Stetka
says. "He's Hitler in a cloak."

It's in these group dynamics that the hidden magic of Potter
lies.

In the study, lead
author Loris Vezzali of
the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy gave 34
elementary school children a questionnaire regarding their
feelings about immigrants. Their attitudes toward them
changed, by way of Harry Potter.

Stetka sketches the
experiment:

One group read passages relating to prejudice, like the scene
where Draco Malfoy, a shockingly blond pure-blood wizard, calls
Harry's friend Hermione a "filthy little Mudblood." The control
group read excerpts unrelated to prejudice, including the scene
where Harry buys his first magic wand.

A week after the last session, the children's attitudes towards
out-groups were assessed again. Among those who identified with
the Harry Potter character, attitudes toward immigrants were
found to be significantly improved in children who'd read
passages dealing with prejudice. The attitudes of those who'd
read neutral passages hadn't changed.

After being exposed to Malfoy's
unsavory intolerance, the students showed more
tolerance.

Follow-up experiments showed
similar tolerance-inducing results. In one experiment, Italian
high schoolers had better attitudes toward gay people after
spending some time with Harry and the gang, while another found
that British college students felt more compassionate toward
refugees after hanging out in Hogwarts.

The key might be the genre
itself. Vezzali,
the lead author of the study, says that fantasy is great for
opening up people's minds because you get to sidestep political
defensiveness since you're usually dealing with goblins and orcs
rather than groups of people.

"Unfortunately the news we read on a daily basis tells us we have
so much work to do [around tolerance]," Vezzali says. "But based
on our work, fantasy books such as Harry Potter may be of great
help to educators and parents in teaching tolerance."

This post was updated to reflect the fact that the term
"mudblood" indicates Muggle-born witches and wizards such as
Hermione, not Harry.